Estranged for the holidays

Sunday

None of the factors of estrangement let up just for one be-tinseled day on the calendar. Especially during a time of relentless, feel-good marketing, dysfunction can weigh heavily.

Sometimes distance is measured in miles.

This holiday season, for instance, traffic will increase by 11.4 percent from last year, according to the American Automobile Association. Approximately 42.2 million travelers will head forth, covering an average of 816 miles.

But there's another way to measure distance. In many families at Thanksgiving and beyond, distance can apply not only to pavement covered but to the emotional roads not taken. And this is substantially harder to bear for families torn by conflict.

Estrangement happens for many reasons — separation and divorce, abuse, old family rifts, death of a loved one, addiction, geography, moral beliefs. And none of these factors let up just for one be-tinseled day on the calendar. Especially during a time of relentless, feel-good marketing, dysfunction can weigh heavily.

"The holiday is almost condemning if you're not able to participate in the joyfulness," says Ray Tamasi, the CEO of the Gosnold Treatment Center, based in Falmouth, with six in-patient and eight out-patient treatment centers across Cape Cod, Brockton and North Dartmouth.

"The holidays, just by definition, bring back nostalgic memories, which can make people more depressed about the current times," he says. "It can bring folks back into contact when they may not be able to really relate in a positive way. The memories for most people are very strong, whether those are positive memories when things were really nice, or whether they bring back memories of traumatic times, when parents were not really the sort of Ozzie and Harriet, if you will."

Frederick Woolverton wrote about just such an upbringing in a column titled "The Most-Hated Son" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. In an account of his recent efforts to "court" the abusive, alcoholic and now ailing mother who disowned him when he was 19, Woolverton explained that, after more than 30 years of silence, his desire was, "Not to make amends, really. I wanted to see her once and not be afraid."

Woolverton, a psychologist and director of the Village Institute for Psychotherapy in Fayetteville, Ark., has for many years advocated against the psychoanalytic teaching that the therapist should be a “blank slate.” However, the Times column was “the first really direct ‘me, my life,’ put ... out there for print in the public.”

One person who responded positively to his essay was a patient whom Woolverton had counseled for many years not to give up on a "very disturbed" son.

"I've said hang in there with your son, don't give up," Woolverton says. "Over the maybe three or four years, he said I gave him great advice, but there was a tiny bit of him that said, 'Fred has never been there.' "

After reading the Nov. 14 "Lives" column in the Sunday magazine, the patient told his therapist, "You've been there."

"One of the things I know and psychiatric emergency rooms know is that acute depression (and) acute anxiety go sky high during this period," Woolverton says about the holidays. "Patients come in and say, 'This is supposed to be a happy time of year.' "

Ron Desnoyers, a psychiatric social worker at St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford, can testify to the significant increase in patients coming into the hospital with feelings of hopelessness and depression around the holidays. Desnoyers says he's noticed that families have become more isolated over the years, which makes family get-togethers more of a pressure cooker.

"The expectation is that you're going to reengage with people that you know very well historically but who you haven't had much contact with recently," he says. "You can't really expect that it's going to be like you never left. There's a period of readjustment even if you're siblings — some sense of finding your way with each other once again."

Looking to find your way with blood relatives you hardly recognize anymore is a consuming demand. Donna McMullen, a therapist at the Center for Family Therapy in Mashpee, calls these high hopes "dangerous."

"If people have had difficult relationships with their family, they get nervous," she says. "So if people feel like, 'I'm just going to go and enjoy my time with my family and not get into any disagreements and expect that things are going to go just so' — things don't usually go 'just so.' "

Derek Foulds, assistant clinical director of the Mental Health Program and leader of the Home Therapy Program at Family Service Association (FSA) in Fall River, counsels kids and young adults (ages 5-22) who have been placed in the residential treatment center due to behavioral problems or because of abusive situations at home. Most of these kids get to leave the FSA on Thanksgiving, he says — sometimes to meet with parents, but often to meet with the only available relative or guardian who's able to take care of them, even if it's just for a few hours.

Foulds observes changes in kids' behavior — and anxiety building — from the minute Thanksgiving and Christmas commercials begin. "I'd see kids watching commercials on TV and there's a perfect little family and all of a sudden you see acting-out behavior," he says. "They're really feeling low self-esteem. I've spent the last decade or so working around framing the thinking that not every family is perfect. It's OK to view (holidays) as stressful and difficult."

It's a longing for the security that a functional family offers — the dream of the perfect home — that creates such impossibly high expectations during the holidays, offers Desnoyers, the St. Luke's social worker. "We do have in our minds the idealistic perspective and, in most cases, it falls short. So if we find ourselves in this post-Thanksgiving funk, give ourselves a reality check and say, well, my family is such and such a way and we often do have these problems."

"People are actually unhappy during this time of year," Woolverton says. "Everyone would be better off if they just said it. This is a hard time because families get together. Everybody has a better time if they just say to themselves, 'This is a complicated (Thanksgiving) dinner and that's OK, it is what it is.' But it's complicated."

One point of contention is that while you may have changed — gone through therapy or moved on — your family most likely hasn't, and the old issues will still be waiting as usual to rear their ugly heads, says McMullen, the Mashpee therapist. Even if you substitute another word for God, she recommends using the Serenity Prayer to make it through the day: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

"We all have been like, 'Oh maybe this'll be different this year,'" McMullen says. "Unless people have made a decision and have set down some boundaries, it's not. When you're not in control of other people, we can only control our behavior, that's what it comes down to."

Woolverton agrees.

"Your parents are your parents and you're their child. Everyone regresses and your parents are going to treat you like you're 7 because it's wired in their brains. You're going to bring all your childhood dynamics."

McMullen advises setting clear boundaries for family get-togethers, including topics that you should avoid, such as politics or uncomfortable events of the past.

"It's so important to have family members who understand the nature of addiction," Tamasi, the Gosnold CEO, says of family events with recovering addicts. "We encourage people to refrain from dragging things up. There's a time to do that."

Every year, as preparation for the holidays, Foulds sits down weeks ahead of time and comes up with a plan with his young patients at the Fall River center, equipping them with specific "crisis averting" steps — a list of phone numbers to call if the child feels unsafe or stressed out for whatever reason, topics to avoid. The plan is posted on the refrigerator of the home where the child will be spending the holidays. It's not a bad idea for adults who need support to bring along numbers for a 12-step program, fellow divorcees, therapists or friends.

Bob Menard, a facilitator for the Diocesan Divorced and Separated Support Group, which meets in Dartmouth on the second and last Thursdays every month, says that friends were the link that kept him going through the holidays, especially during his divorce in 1980, when it was difficult to talk with family: "You're now left almost like a homeless person. You have no wife, she's gone. Some relatives just don't understand at all. Like, 'Oh, get on with it.' So it feels very awkward," he says.

One factor that flows through many difficult family events is alcohol, which Desnoyers says is the most "significant trigger" during holiday get-togethers.

"We know that alcohol helps us relax, but we also know that it becomes a trigger towards inhibition and then people pouring out past conflicts that may have occurred in families, so it can turn into these traumatic events," he says. "It's important that you maintain some stability and some social restraint, especially if you're confronted with other family members that aren't in the same state of mind."

Tamasi advises doing away with alcohol altogether out of respect for any recovering alcoholic who may be present. "It's respecting the fragility of early recovery to say, 'Tom's been through a very difficult time, he's just got out of treatment and this year we're not going to have that out of respect.'"

But there is hope for finding a way to enjoy the holidays — just from the example of Woolverton, who describes holidays as a child as "nightmarish, because they were dominated by a very cruel mother." Now, he's relearning how to welcome the holidays as a time of enjoyment in the company of loved ones, mostly through his wife, daughter and in-laws, whom he describes as a "fundamentally healthy family."

"If you dread the holidays for 20 years, it's hard not to dread the holidays," he says. "And it's a kind of relearning process to be there and not expect catastrophe. And be surprised and welcoming of the good times."

This story was edited Dec. 3 to correct a reporter's error regarding Frederick Woolverston's approach to psychotherapy.

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